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Unpopular opinion: I think the Hubble images get way more credit than they deserve for showing us what space 'really' looks like.
I just read a fact in an article from the European Space Agency's website that said the famous Pillars of Creation image uses colors mapped to specific elements, like sulfur and hydrogen, which means the vibrant blues and golds aren't what our eyes would see at all, and that kind of changes the whole 'window to the universe' idea for me.
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the_robin5mo ago
So does that make them more like scientific diagrams than actual photos?
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skyler_johnson325mo ago
Remember my buddy showing me his astronomy pics last year. He got so mad explaining it. Said his "photo" of a nebula was really like 12 pictures and a bunch of data stacked together. Took him weeks to make it look like what he saw through the scope. Felt more like he built it than took it. So yeah, diagram is a good way to put it. It's a made picture to show an idea, not a snap of a thing.
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viola_garcia565mo ago
Totally. It's a processed image, not a snapshot. More like a map of data points.
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fionanguyen5mo ago
Honestly, that "built it" part from Skyler hits hard. Tbh it makes me wonder if the real photo is the raw data set, and the pretty picture we see is just the best translation for our eyes. Like we're trying to show a blind person what red looks like using only words. We're always translating something.
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